20 GB hard drive only has 14 GB space?

[sirhansirhan]

I bought a used 20 GB hard drive for my 360 at GameStop yesterday, and when I went home and stuck it in the system, it says that it only has 13.7 GB of space on it. It's fresh--I wiped it clean again just to make sure. I'm new at this hard drive thing; is this normal? Should I return it?

[Oobgarm]

6 GB of the HDD is reserved for system use.

[fcw3]

I've wondered the same thing since I got my machine at Christmas. The math just never added up. The amount of space occupied by what I had plus the free space wasn't equalling 20.

Thanks for clearing that up.

FRED

[dcescott]

6GB's for system use? Cheezus. I just reformatted a 20GB external and got 18GB and some change. then again, I am a mac user. I don't know. 6gb is lot of system space imo.

[Flack]

6GB's for system use? Cheezus. I just reformatted a 20GB external and got 18GB and some change. then again, I am a mac user. I don't know. 6gb is lot of system space imo.

The 6gb is reserved for cache, backwards compatibility (emulation), dashboard updates, and more. Turns out, programs take up space ... even on a Mac.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Well, FAT/NTFS formatted hard drives use a chunk of the space for file information and of course, the lookup table, as well as recovery data and whatnot.

But 6GB is insane.

[dcescott]

True for internal, I can see that happening with the OS and such/cache (I didn't think about that). But an external? No way! I think Leopard required 6-8GB of disk space when I upgraded my laptop. I guess I view externals as a holding cell for files.

[Gapporin]

Slightly off-topic, but when I bought and formatted my external 160GB hard drive for my laptop, it claimed about ~12GB in the formatting, leaving me with 148GB of space. My iPod is 80GB, and it had about ~6GB taken up by formatting. I don't own a 320GB drive, but I imagine that the formula would be the same: about ~24GB used in the formatting.

I coulda used that extra 12GB of space.

[Kitsune Sniper]

That's probably because of the drive size bullshit.

Manufacturers claim that 1GB is 1'000,000,000 bytes instead of 1,073,741,824, like they're supposed to. Even though your "160 GB" drive claimed to have that amount, it actually had something like 149 GB - the formatting only took one gig away.

You didn't lose that much space, manufacturers just label the drives improperly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte

[Gapporin]

Well, that makes sense. Sucks that they label it as such, though, especially with the wider discrepancies once you get into the really large drives.

[Slate]

You are talking about a Xbox 360 hard drive, right?

[dcescott]

Well yeah, but I guess I was referring to the source of the hard drive. Microsoft.

I'm thinking they know what to do, even though Vista is a pile of crap (everyone I speak to hates it and either reloaded XP or took it back), they are a PC company after all and would figure a better way to show 40GB is 40GB, not 6Gb less than per 40.

I'll never understand why since I am on the gaming end and designing end, not the IT stuff.

[ProgrammingAce]

The hard drive manufacturers are lying to you by selling you a hard drive they claim is 160 gig. In reality, they made up their own number for what a gigabyte is.

It's not up to microsoft to cover up their lies.

Microsoft doesn't help their own case by selling a 20 gig drive with only 13.5 usable space though...

[diskoboy]

Everything on the market that contains a hard drive usually contains the disclaimer:

"Formatted capacity may vary by device"

And did you remove all the extra videos and music that came pre-installed on the HD? Not to mention no one has yet to mention Hexic HD also takes up some of that space...

The PS3 HD does the same thing. Completely empty, with only the OS installed, my PS3's HD showed only 54GB (of a 60gb HD).

[s1lence]

I didn't think this was "new" news. The 120gig HDD also has a large portion taken up on the 360. Same with the HDD on my PC.

[Sotenga]

HEY! What a ripoff! I honestly didn't know this until it was brought to light... thanks for letting me know about this. Jerks trying to pull one over on us... it's like how the quarter-pounder is only really a quarter-pound BEFORE it gets cooked. I'm not sure that's the best analogy for this case, but you get the idea. :grrr:

[cyberfluxor]

Just be glad it's no measured in words, pages, frames, or nibbles. Obviously the hardware developer teams outsource with known working and reliable harddrive manufacturers (or at least try to).

[Daltone]

I thought there was something to do with disc space loss and the way the OS addressed the space on the HDD too? He mumbles, wondering if this is absolute nonesense. I should probably go and find that book. Actually, Wikipedia might do (2nd paragraph)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_drive#Capacity_measurements

Does that even apply here?

EDIT: Whoops! Left this window open for far too long and missed a lot of the above posts. Already beaten to it I see!

[DonMarco]

I always thought the 4-5 gigs went towards virtual memory and other things like that. VM on a XP system would be a max of 2GB...

... Hay, listen!

Maybe Microsoft has some shadowy intent, like a secret program that records and feeds info on playing habits and uploads it directly to central command where the realtime manifestations of the gaming collective are channeled through the data rec

[Leo_A]

Its worth noting that things like MS's Xbox emulator use some of that allotted unusuable harddrive space. Its not just for virtual memory that its being reserved for, but other uses as well.

[Niku-Sama]

oh jesus christ people, theres a chunk missing out of the 360 drive for your compatibility, game updates, and other such things.
some of those game updates are pretty large

theres a chunk missing out of you PC drive, i am sure alot of you people are overlooking the Operating System (not all) like xp, jaguar, or vista.
also a chunk of it goes to the partition information when you make a drive usable for an operating system, the chunk used isdependant on the size/ammount of partitions are on a hard disk.

if you have to ask what a partition is you shouldnt be arguing about the space missing from your hard drive.

as an example i have a 160 gig hitachi SATA II hard drive with 3 partitions on it and its allowing me to write in 156gigs of the total space 4gigs isnt bad considering what its gotta keep track of. in reality in the ammount of bytes i have ~164,000,000,000bytes its allowing me to write in, also theres a weird thing in windows i havent ever been able to figure out.

in xp using a NTFS partition whem you right click on a file, it'll tell you size and size on disk, it may be the way it converts it but its funky

[bacteria]

You never get the amount of Gb your drive states. The drive starts out at the capacity stated, but as soon as you format the drive to use it, lots of space magically disappears. It has always been the way. Losing 10-20% of the space this way is normal.

[Cryomancer]

My "400 gig" harddrive in my PC formatted to 372 gigs. It's normal. Shitty, but an industry standard.

[Flack]

Some of you guys are comparing apples and oranges here. The space that's "missing" on the Xbox 360 drive isn't missing -- it's reserved for other things (which have already been mentioned above).

Comparing the "missing" drive space to the overhead that's used up when formatting a drive isn't the same thing. This would be more like complaining about the space your operating system (Windows or whatever) takes up.

On many computer systems (Compaq I know for sure, some HPs, and many others) there is a "system partition" on your hard drive. This is where system backup and restoration files are stored. Generally speaking, you don't have access to it (it's not a place where you would want to store files, put it that way). That space is reserved, and not for you. Same thing on the Xbox 360.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Um, I mentioned some of the space in normal PC hard drives being taken up by the formatting, but still - SIX GIGS is a fuckton of space for a twenty gig drive to not have available. :p

Also, system partitions are stupid. Give us back our CDs, you bastards!

[fcw3]

On the XBox 360, it make sense to allocate, in essence, a swap file. Levels, video and the like can be loaded to the HD for faster access.

Burnout Paradise REQUIRES you to have the HD for online play. It must be some form of a cache they are using. Six gig does seem a bit much (30%?) on a 20 gig drive...

[c0ldb33r]

OH MY GOD THIS THREAD IS SO FRUSTRATING!!!!1!!!

He's talking about an xbox 360 hard drive!

Don't compare that to an external hard drive you have with your mac.

Or an internal hard drive with your mac.

Or anything with a PC.

Or anything other than an xbox 360.

And it has nothing to do with Vista.

I admit it's annoying, but please don't extend these criticisms to other hard drives and systems.

Sorry if this sounds pissy but I was almost ready to pull some hair out while reading these responses.

[zektor]

Yep, I saw this myself when I purchased my 360 with 20GB drive. Thought it was odd, but understood that it has to be that the system software takes up space.

Funny thing is, the same amount was being used on my 80GB ps3 when I purchased it. Only showed 74GB free.....6GB used here too. Oh well...